Sublime Reality Forum

discover the greatest human illusionand ways to overcome it

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The Sublime Reality Initiative exposes how humanity is living an illusory dream; due to increasing materialism or physicalism, most people think they are the material body. Such thinking is termed 'skeletonism'. On the other hand, ‘sublimism’ is the paradigm that we are a sublime being beyond the material body.

Do you sometimes think that life is more than just a jumble of matter, and that you are more than just a collection of chemical compounds?

Actually, many people, including prominent scientists and philosophers, think like this, but in school, teachers still teach skeletonism. Why is this so? Many people claim that there is no evidence for sublimism, but that is not a fact. There is clear evidence that we are to hundred percent not the material body and its relations. This website exposes the illusion of skeletonism and inspires people to wake up to the sublime reality.

Such an awakening is at first shocking because we have become so much habituated with our illusory identity. In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato described men who were chained in a dark cave for life. When one man finally gets freed, he does not want leave the dark cave because he cannot tolerate the blinding light. Similarly, when we are confronted with a higher truth, we may not be ready to accept it because it appears painful to us, questioning our old beliefs.

Most people don't want to be freed from illusion and thus disillusioned - they prefer to remain in illusion. When we are illusioned, truth tastes bitter, but becomes sweet in the end, whereas untruth seems sweet, but is bitter in the end. We hope you are strong enough to first face the bitter basic truth and to then explore the sweet sublime truth.

Let's be brave to face the bright light of truth - it may blind us for a while, but then we'll see the higher dimensions of the sublime reality.

Definitions

Sublimism: Paradigm that the self is a sublime being beyond the material body.

Skeletonism: Paradigm that the self is one's material body or a part of it.

Sublimism is not promoting any particular human tradition or faith. Sublimism is the challenge to admit the illusion of thinking to be the material body and to discover our sublime self and the sublime reality.

Although sublimism exposes the difference of the self and the material body, it does not enforce self-body duality in toto. It is possible that we have a sublime spiritual body, and that there is no duality between the sublime body and the self. However, sublimism is not affirmative in this regard because it is noncommittal in regards to the exact spiritual nature of the self as to avoid bias and as to not exclude any traditional understandings.

Skeletonism is related to materialism, the belief that matter is the only reality and that everything in the world, including thought, will, and feeling, can be explained only in terms of matter.

However, skeletonism is not limited to the materialists. Most spiritual people also identify themselves to a bigger or lesser extent with their body and its attributes, relations, country and culture. On the other hand, most of those who claim to be materialists also relate to sublimism to some extend, especially when it comes to social relations and moral questions. Thus most people are not pure or hard skeletonists or sublimists, but either soft skeletonists or soft sublimists.

The Sublime Reality Initiative advocates sublimism in the sense of pure sublimism because skeletonism is illusory, and illusion is harmful.

Arguments Supporting Sublimism

1. Arguments From Biology Supporting Sublimism

The cells of the material body are constantly aging and dying and being replaced by new cells. The maximal living span of most cells is seven years. This means that almost the entire human body is renewed every seven years.

The second photograph of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip on the right was taken 65 years after the first one - on the day of their Diamond Jubilee. During these 65 years, their bodies were almost completely renewed nine times.

According to what science knows about bodily cell age, the average age of an adult human body is around 7 years. So if you think that you are the material body, then the next time someone asks you about your age, you may answer: “I'm around 7 years old!”

Very few people, however, will agree with this. Most adults believe that they are still the same person they were 14 years ago, even if their body was almost entirely renewed twice in this span of time. This means that most people, knowingly or unknowingly, are sublimists; they believe that they are something sublime beyond their material body. In fact, once exposed, skeletonism is revealed to be a very silly concept of self. Just imagine the following three scenarios:

(1) Sarah was born 56 years ago, but every year on her birthday she insists that she is only 7 years old. She explains this as follows: “In school we are taught that we are nothing but the material body. According to what science knows about bodily cell age, the average age of any adult human body is around 7 years. Therefore I remain 7 years old for the rest of my life.”

(2) After 20 years of marriage, Max tries to marry another woman without first divorcing. When questioned about this, he explains: “I never married that woman. According to skeletonism, I am nothing but the material body. The material body which married the body of that woman is long gone, and I am not that body. I am around 7 years old, and I never married anyone – so what is the need for me to divorce?”

(3) Mister Miller deposited one thousand dollars in a bank account. After 20 years he again goes to the bank and wants to withdraw some money. He is shocked to hear what the bank clerk tells him: “You are no more the owner of those thousand dollars, because the body of Mister Miller who deposited the thousand dollars 20 years ago is almost entirely replaced by now. That Mister Miller practically does not exist anymore.”

In real life, the above three scenarios are not heard of. Despite their bodies being around 7 years old only, Sarah would still be considered 56 years old; Max would still be the official husband of his wife and Mister Miller would still be the possessor of the thousand dollars. These facts prove that people are officially accepted as the same persons they were 20 years ago. So if we, the person, the actual identity, the true self, remain the same, but our body changes almost entirely, then the logical conclusion is that we are not the material body. We are something sublime beyond the material body.

Syllogistic presentation:

Premise 1: The material body is almost entirely renewed every 7 years.

Premise 2: The person is officially accepted to be still the same even after 20 years.

Conclusion: The person or self is not the material body, but something more sublime.

(Note: The only way that one could defend skeletonism in the above argument would be by devising a theory according to which the self ‘hides’ in those few parts that remain intact over the entire human life span, such as the neurons of the cerebral cortex and the DNA molecules. However, such a theory would be ruled out by the arguments following below.)

2. Arguments From Medicine Supporting Sublimism

In
2008, Dr. Allen Hamilton, a Harvard-educated brain surgeon and professor with
thirty years of experience in his field, published his first book, The Scalpel and the Soul, which won the Nautilus Book
Award. In a video about this book, Dr. Hamilton speaks out about

“things that medical science say should not be possible.”

Hamilton explains that similar strange events occur in hospitals around the
USA, but doctors are afraid to talk about them, lest they lose credibility.

Hamilton recounts an operation he had done on a young woman whose blood vessel ruptured at the base of her brain. They put her on a bypass pump that takes over the functions of the heart and the lungs. Then they slowly cooled her body down and then turned off the pump for 25 minutes, during which the heart and the brain stopped working completely with no blood flowing. Dr. Hamilton assures that during this period,

“She is completely dead by every criteria we have”.

In this state, the ruptured blood vessel is repaired. During the period of the operation there happened to be some private conversations between the staff members. One of the nurses announced that she is getting engaged. After the successful operation and reanimation, Dr. Hamilton visited his patient in recovery. Hamilton recalls:

“She starts telling us about this private conversation, but word for word, right down to the jewelry store where they bought the ring! That’s impossible – her brain had absolutely no electrical activity! So the question is; where were these memories made? The idea that a consciousness can exist and make memories independent of the brain is a startling finding.”

There are thousands of people who have had out-of-body experiences. There are even medical reports where patients under full anesthesia were able to witness and correctly disclose incidents that happened in other rooms during the operation. In the narrow concept of skeletonism, it is impossible to explain how people under full anesthesia can witness their own operation and events in other rooms. In order to preserve the old paradigm of skeletonism, these events have been blacklisted as paranormal and banished into the chamber of taboos by those who are not prepared to learn the sublime lesson that the self is beyond the material body.

Premise 2: A person is able to perceive, process and memorize external events correctly while that person's material body is clinically dead.

Conclusion: The person is not dead when the material body is clinically dead; the person is not the material body, but something more sublime.

3. Arguments from Neuroscience Supporting Sublimism

One article about optical illusions on www.neurosciencenews.com is entitled “How Your Eyes Deceive You”. Certain optical illusions in the article also include deceptions of our brain. Thus the title could also be “How Your Eyes and Brain Deceive You.” From such phrases, we can understand that we, the observers, are different from our eyes and brain. It is not that we deceive ourselves when we are dumbfound by optical illusions.

If we would stick to skeletonism – the common belief that we are the material body – then the eyes and brain would be part of our self, and that would mean that we are deceiving ourselves in the case of optical illusions. Let us observe the phenomenon of optical illusion by watching the images below and ask ourselves: Do we really deceive ourselves? Would the title “How You Deceive Yourself” be acceptable?

>To get the best effect, zoom in so that the image fills your entire screen.

Image 1: Watch closely, and move your focus point slowlyover
the picture. The eyes and brain then create the false impression of
turning wheels. Are your material senses really your best friends?

Image
2: Which square is brighter, A or B? They have the same color and
brightness! In the close-up to the right, they are connected with a
rectangle of the same color and brightness. Now, who is brighter, your
bodily senses or your self? Obviously, your self. Hence you are not the
body – you are beyond the body, something more sublime.

Image
3: Try to count the black spots at the intersections. Who exactly is
fooling you? If you and your body were one, that would mean that you are
fooling yourself. Is that really so? No. Thus you are not the body, but
something more sublime.

Most people will agree that we are not deceiving ourselves when we encounter optical illusions. The eyes and brain that deceive us are thus not part of our self but alien elements. This supports sublimism.

When we say “I see that the sun is shining”, we should be aware that actually, “I am accepting optical data from my eyes that suggests that the sun is shining.” We have no control over how reliable the data is that we receive from any of our sensual organs. For this reason, many people in search of reality have reasoned that we must discover ways of direct perception without having to depend on unreliable alien agents like the material bodily senses.

Conclusion: We are not the sensual organs and brain, but something much more sublime.

4. Arguments from Ethics Supporting Sublimism

Humans possess ethics that they protect with morals and laws. Let us focus on four ‘Core Values’: love, individuality, freewill and ethics. We perceive these values as having real existence. This is the classical perception of the Core Values, which is, as we shall see, based on sublimism. Modern science teaches materialism and skeletonism, according to which love, individuality, free will and ethics are mere epiphenomena, accidental by-products of chemical reactions creating mental impressions that have no independent classical existence. They are like programs of machines.

For example, let’s say Jane and Robert want to get married. According to sublimism, their love is real, their individuality is real, their freedom of choice is real, and their ethics are real. But according to materialism or skeletonism, these Core Values are only pipe-dreams of robots. Jane and Robert are mere lumps of matter without any classical individuality and free will. Following the dictates of the chemicals in their brains reacting to external senseimpressions, one lump is forced to marry another lump. However, their impressions of free will and love are real in as much as programs of machines are real; they are robots with free will simulation programs. This is how materialists argue that materialistic or epiphenomenal Core Values are not entirely unreal. To be clear, we are in the following speaking about classical Core Values, not epiphenomenal Core Values.

According to materialism, we are simply like waves in an ocean of matter and our experience of existence as factually existing individual beings is illusory as we are all but matter. It would then not be ethically incorrect to plunder and kill others because since we don’t possess free will, everything is already determined and we cannot be held responsible for any action since we are not the doers. According to materialism, there are no classical subjects at all; no I, no you, no we. So if I kill someone, nobody kills and nobody gets killed – it would only be like one wave swallowing another wave by chance.

Of course you could say that it is unethical to terminate a machine as sophisticated as a human machine and thus end its free will simulation program. Even if we subscribe to this view, it is very obvious that it is a radical downgrade of value from the classical, sublime view. Killing a sophisticated machine is more justifiable than killing a classical dog that has classical individuality and free will. Thus if we take materialism seriously – and I hope we never will – it becomes easier to kill a human than to kill a (classical) dog.

We all possess classical ethics and cannot abandon them; we know intuitively that we are individuals; we possess free will and we are responsible for our actions. In practical life, even the staunchest materialist cannot live by the principle that the universe is mere matter evolving by chance. If we were mere lumps of matter there would be no basis for classicalhuman ethics. In order to be able to uphold and further develop classical human ethics, we must embrace its mother paradigm; sublimism.

Syllogistic presentation:

Premise 1: According to skeletonism, we are mere lumps of matter without classical individuality, free will and responsibility.

Premise 2: It is the nature of humans to possess classical ethics depending on the existence of classical individuality, free will and responsibility.

Conclusion: Skeletonism is wrong because it goes against our core nature (we are not ready to abandon our classical ethics for robot ethics). Sublimism, which allows for classical ethics, is right.

5. Arguments from Psychology Supporting Sublimism

(A) In a publication of the Cambridge University Press of the year 2006 entitled Behavioral and Brain Sciences, on pages 453–498, we find a thesis named The Folk Psychology of Souls authored by Dr. Jesse Bering from the Institute of Cognition and Culture of the Queen’s University Belfast. Its introduction begins with the following words:

“By stating that psychological states survive death, one is committing to a radical form of mind-body dualism [in other words, that what survives, the self, is not the material body]. Yet this radicalism is especially common. In the United States alone, 95% of the population reportedly believes in life after death (Greeley & Hout 1999; Lester et al. 2002). The majority of people from other societies, as well, see death as a transitional event that unbuckles the ethereal self from its body.”

A few paragraphs later, Bering quotes the findings of a survey in which children were asked about the biological and psychological functioning of a dead mouse (emphasis added):

“Kindergartners understood that various biological imperatives no longer applied to the dead mouse. (...) Yet when asked whether the dead mouse was hungry or thirsty, or whether it was thinking or had knowledge, most kindergartners said yes. In other words, young children were cognizant of the fact that the body stops working at death but they viewed the mind as still active. (...) In general, however, kindergartners were more apt to make psychological attributions to the dead mouse than were older children, who were not different from adults in this regard. This is precisely the opposite pattern that one would expect to find if the origins of such beliefs could be traced exclusively to cultural indoctrination. In fact, religious or eschatological-type answers (for example, heaven, God, spirits, etc.) among the youngest children were extraordinarily rare. Thus, a general belief in the continuity of mental states in dead agents seems not something that children acquire as a product of their social–religious upbringing, because increasing exposure to cultural norms would increase rather than attenuate afterlife beliefs in young minds. Instead, a natural disposition toward afterlife beliefs is more likely the default cognitive stance and interacts with various learning channels.”

Bering thus explains that the concept of a life after the death of the material body is actually the natural human default concept that may be changed by external indoctrination. He further exposes that this natural concept is present even in adult materialists by quoting a survey (Haidt et al. 2004), in which those who classified themselves as extinctivists (people who believe that the self is the material body and thus dies at death) refused to sign a contract relinquishing their souls at death to an experimenter.

Nobody wants to die. It is not unreasonable to think that most people don’t want to die and believe in life after death because we are immortal by nature. We are not the mortal material body, but something more sublime.

(B) People, despite their body aging, always feel young. This indicates that the self is not aging, and thus the self is not the aging body. The following lines are taken from a poem written by an old man shortly before he died in a hospital:

Crabby Old Man

What do you see nurses? ...What do you see?What are you thinking...when you're looking at me?A crabby old man.......................not very wise,Uncertain of habit ......with faraway eyes?

Who dribbles his food.......and makes no reply.When you say in a loud voice .....'I do wish you'd try!'Who seems not to notice ....the things that you do.And forever is losing .............. a sock or shoe?

Who, resisting or not...........lets you do as you will,With bathing and feeding .........the long day to fill?Is that what you're thinking?.......Is that what you see?Then open your eyes, nurse......you're not looking at me.

(…) Inside this old carcass ..... a young guy still dwells,And now and again ...............my battered heart swells.(…) So open your eyes, people ..........open and see,Not a crabby old man.....look closer.........see...ME!!

(C) Another argument
for sublimism from psychology comes from what we may call the
‘overpower-phenomenon’. Criminals often tell that they were overpowered by some
sinful urge despite trying to fight against it. The same pattern occurs when
one is overcome by anger. We are not angry by nature, but we can be overcome by
the mind and senses to act angrily.

This is the science behind the subtle humor
in the cartoon in which a man is shouting in anger: “I am not angry!”

In the overpower-phenomenon, we can see two different entities interacting: The self, possessing good character and unwillingness to sin, and the material body consisting of the mind and the senses, which can overpower an uncontrolled person. The more a person is self-controlled, the more he or she can discern between the alien influences of the mental and gross body and the self. This is why moral injunctions of sense-control are not only instrumental to minimize human conflict – they are essential for progress in the science of the self.